In our contemporary world, a great deal of cultural discussion revolves around the nature of human dignity and human rights. Sadly, there is not a day that passes in which news concerning human trafficking, gross negligence, or large-scale violent oppression/suppression of human thriving arrests attention. International organizations like Human Rights Watch make it their mission to expose and bring to justice all those who would jeopardize the rights of the weakest members of human society. They act, in part, as a result of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948 as a result of the experience of the Second World War. This Declaration called the international community to a standard that sought to prevent atrocities like those perpetrated in that conflict from happening again.

Unfortunately, conflicts and atrocities committed against the citizens of the world continue in our day. Yet, this standard assumption of basic human rights enables the international community to act when those rights are violated. And indeed, human rights—for most people—are a basic assumption in the concern for and treatment of others. One might ask from where the deep concern for human rights comes? How is it that the concern for human dignity has become a conversation—welcomed or suppressed—in all cultures? Is it simply the result of the Second World War?

In seeking to answer these questions, many would be incredulous if the suggestion came that the Judeo-Christian tradition grounds the concern for human rights today. After all, the pages of the Bible are filled with narratives of slavery and oppression, bloodshed and violence. How could this tradition be the ground for human rights?

Sadly, even those most familiar with the pages of the Bible often fail to see the significance of commands to care for the “foreigner and stranger” issued to the people of Israel. Sojourners or strangers in Israel were included in the law, and they were not to be oppressed or mistreated.(1) Given the brutalities present in the ancient world, these commands to care for strangers and sojourners are most remarkable. Indeed, to anyone familiar with the mindset of the ancient world, it is clear that Israel was to be distinctive in its treatment and care for the least in their midst: orphans, widows, and slaves.(2)

In the Roman world of Jesus’s day, slaves and servants of any kind, men and women, were classified as non habens personam—not having a persona, or more literally, not having a face.(3) Before the law, a slave was not considered a person in the fullest and most proper sense. Author David Bentley Hart notes, “In a sense, the only face proper to a slave, at least as far as the cultural imagination of the ancient world went, was the brutish and grotesquely leering ‘slave mask’ worn by actors on the comic stage: an exquisitely exact manifestation of how anyone who was another’s property was (naturally) seen.”(4) Simply stated, anyone without a noble birth was not given consideration with regard to human dignity or fair treatment as a fellow human being.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Impetus of Personhood →

“The ‘kingdom of God’ is for the gullible,” I read recently.  “You enter by putting an end to all your questions.”

It’s true that Jesus moved all over Judea pronouncing the reign of God and the kingdom of heaven as if it were a notion he wanted the simplest soul to get his mind around.  But simplicity was not what hearers walked away with. With great disparity, he made it clear that this kingdom was approaching, that it was here, that it was among us, that we needed to enter it, that we need to wait for it, that we desperately need the one who reigns within it. The tension within so many different and dynamic realities turned the clarity of each individual picture into a great and ambiguous portrait. He insisted, the kingdom “has come near you.” Yet he prayed, “Thy kingdom come.“(1) Paul, too, described the placement of believers in the kingdom as something established: “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.”(2) While the writer of Hebrews described the kingdom as an ongoing gift we must accept: “Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us therefore give thanks.”(3) To make matters all the more complex, Jesus also assigned the kingdom imagery such as a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, and a great banquet, among others.

Contrary to putting an end to one’s questions, the kingdom of God incites inquiry all the more. What is the nature of this kingdom? Can it be all of these things? Who is this messenger? And what kind of proclamation requires the herald to pour out his very life to tell it? Whatever this kingdom is, it unmistakably introduces to a world far different from the one around us, one we cannot quite get our minds around, with tensions and dynamisms reminiscent of the promise of God to answer our cries “with great and unsearchable things you do not know.”(4) It is a kingdom that tells a story grand enough to master the metanarratives which otherwise compel us into thoughtless, gullible obedience. It is a kingdom with a king whose very authority exposes our idols as wood and reforms our numbed minds with great and surprising reversals of reality.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.

In this kingdom Jesus proclaims we are shown a God who opens the eyes of the blind and raises the dead, who claims the last will be the first, and the servant is the greatest. But his proclamations did not cease with mere easy words. Jesus put these claims into action, placing this kingdom before us in such a way that forbids us to see any of it as mere religion, abstraction, gullibility, or sentimentality:

“Then the whole assembly rose and led Jesus off to Pilate.  And they began to accuse him, saying, ‘We have found this man subverting our nation.  He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Christ, a king.’

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – This Kingdom →